The Election That Obliterated Euphemisms

The Donald Trump campaign inadvertently performed a public service when it exposed the weakness and vulnerability of the euphemisms long used by political journalists. News organizations have been forced to acknowledge that phrases like “stretched the truth” and “fudged the facts” are useless for describing a candidate who speaks falsely in virtually every breath. Genteel circumlocution has given way to calling out lies as lies.

Mr. Trump’s campaign has also made it difficult for opinion writers — even those disposed to give him the benefit of the doubt — to avoid describing his behavior as racist. The signal moment came when, having already characterized Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists, he declared an American-born judge of Mexican descent unfit to preside over a lawsuit against the con game known as Trump University. Even the House speaker, Paul Ryan, had to concede that this was “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”

Instead of using phrases like “racially inflammatory” or “racially insensitive,” editorial pages were calling racism by its name. The shift was clear in the language of the endorsements Hillary Clinton received from news organizations across the political spectrum.

The Cincinnati Enquirer — endorsing a Democrat for president for the first time in a century — observed that Mr. Trump seemed incapable of even opening his mouth “without saying something misogynistic, racist or xenophobic.” The Dallas Morning News — in its first Democratic presidential endorsement since before the United States entered World War II — argued that Mr. Trump’s appeal to racism and other pathologies brings out the worst in the country. The New Yorker recoiled from a Trump campaign it described as “sickeningly sexist and racist.”

This brand of frankness came second-hand to the traditional press through social media, especially Twitter, where younger African-Americans are more likely than other internet users to be heavily engaged. That Americans in general — and news organizations in particular — are increasingly using social media has also helped push frank racial discussions to the fore.

The black-inflected online community has offered a nonstop tutorial on the nature of institutional racism and how it has led to tragedies like the Charleston church massacre and the shootings of Trayvon Martin, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, Laquan McDonald, Philando Castile and many others.

Black Twitter has ridiculed attempts by traditional news media and others to draw a distinction between racism and “unintentional bias.” Those who defend this distinction typically argue that deploying the charge of racism commits harm by alienating people and stopping “the conversation.”

This argument reduces the discussion of structural racism to the equivalent of dinner party chatter, in which one guest challenges the bigoted views of another without spilling the Margaux. But life is no dinner party. And an unarmed black man shot by a police officer is dead whether the officer is openly bigoted or not. The Black Lives Matter movement deserves much of the credit for pushing back against that distinction and advancing a candid way of speaking about racism that is making its way into the national consciousness.

Social media platforms and online publications have also given the country a window into another world, one defined by hate: the white supremacist Trump supporters who rain down anti-Semitic vitriol on people like Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic. Mr. Goldberg, in a recent interview, described the dispiriting feeling of signing onto Twitter some days and finding “100 messages all with basically the same theme, which is that I should be gassed and that my family should be put in the ovens.” Noting the candidate’s failure to take a definitive stand against this brand of horror, Mr. Goldberg has reached the conclusion that Mr. Trump himself is a racist.

The bigoted outpouring licensed by the Trump campaign will surely persist — whether or not Mr. Trump wins. This election has made clear that racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny and xenophobia still have broad constituencies in America. The first step toward keeping them at bay is to insist on calling them by their rightful names.